Now let’s make our chart a little nicer by adding some titles, etc. It’s very easy to pick out who did the best and who did the worst on each test when the data is displayed like this. This chart is useful too because now I can see the scores for all the students per exam. Now here’s what the chart looks like with the same data, but with X and Y switched. One neat thing you can do is click on Switch Row/Column under Data and the chart will instantly change with the data switched.
Here you can change everything under the sun when it comes to your new chart. That’s great, but what if I wanted to visualize the data in a different way? Well, by default, once the chart is added, you’ll see a new section at the top of the ribbon called Chart Tools with three tabs: Design, Layout and Format. Each student has four bars for their respective test scores. In the above example, I see each person along the X axis and the test scores on the Y axis. Creating a chart is easy, but what you can do with your chart after making it is what makes Excel such a great tool.
That’s it! You have created your first graph/chart in Excel and it literally takes just a few minutes. So now Excel will create the chart based on the data and dump it somewhere on your sheet.
